Limavady at Nashville Cocktail Takeover | Belfast Whiskey Week 2025

Name: Belfast Whiskey Week 2026
Start: 2026-07-24
End: 2026-08-01
Location: Belfast

Filed: 15 Jul 2025
By: Belfast Whiskey Week
Read: 4 min
Ref: BWW/25/468

On a warm Thursday evening in late July, Common Market became something altogether different — part honky-tonk, part cocktail laboratory, part street-food bazaar, with the uisce beatha flowing freely and the music loud enough to rattle the keepsake glasses. The Nashville Cocktail Takeover was one of Belfast Whiskey Week 2025's most exuberant sessions, and Limavady Irish Whiskey arrived from the Roe Valley ready to make its mark among a stellar lineup of twelve distilleries and brands.

About This Event

Thursday 24 July 2025
Common Market, Belfast · 6 pm – 9pm

Nashville - Cocktail Takeover

Step into a buzzing food-hall takeover where craft cocktails, street-food aromas and LIVE Nashville sounds collide.

Local whiskey brands collaborate with our best mixologists and purveyors of great cocktails in a must taste Takeover in Common Market.

Tickets includes 5 bespoke drinks from a choice of 10 specially curated cocktails as a collaboration between distilleries and brands along with Nashville Style Music & Nashville Style Eats.

Say Hello and come drink with: Dunville’s, Outwalker, Fore Distillery, Hinch, Titanic, McConnell’s, Copeland, Killowen, Jameson, Limavady, Shortcross & Wavey Ice!

Try some exclusive and limited food offerings from Smash Bros, Zeus, Knead, Sicariois, The Wing Society, Top Dog, Badmaash and Pie Eyed!

Roaming mixologists shaking whiskey-laced creations at pop-up bars
Vibrant street-food stalls, from juicy smash burgers to bao and tacos
Live Nashville Style Music, Bands and of course some great
Complimentary keepsake glass so the memories linger after last orders

Where else will you get 5 bespoke Cocktails, great live music and a choice of excellent food, for £35?

As a reminder: Common Market will be open to the Public at all times. To take part in the Cocktail Takeover, you will need to purchase a ticket.

Looking Back

From the moment the doors opened at six o'clock, the energy inside Common Market had that rare quality — the kind you can't manufacture with a marketing budget. Roaming mixologists threaded through the crowd, shaking and stirring at pop-up stations while the smell of smash burgers and bao drifted across the hall from vendors like Smash Bros, Zeus, Knead and The Wing Society. Somewhere above it all, live Nashville-style bands leaned into the theme without a hint of irony. It was one of those evenings that reminded you why Belfast does events like this better than almost anywhere else — there's a duchas to the hospitality here, a deep cultural comfort with gathering, drinking well and making strangers feel welcome.

Ticket holders had five bespoke drinks to claim from a menu of ten specially curated cocktails, each one a genuine collaboration between a distillery and the festival's mixologists. Limavady brought the character of the Roe Valley into the glass — a single barrel whiskey bourbon-matured and finished in Pedro Ximénez sherry casks, it carries a richness and dried-fruit warmth that lends itself beautifully to cocktail work. Where some whiskeys resist the mixologist's hand, Limavady meets it, the PX sweetness playing off citrus and bitters without losing the whiskey's identity. Paired alongside Outwalker at the event — a pairing that has become something of a recurring conversation at BWW 2025 — the Limavady expressions attracted a steady queue of the curious and the converted alike.

The breadth of the lineup was genuinely impressive. Dunville's, Hinch, Titanic, McConnell's, Copeland, Killowen, Jameson, Shortcross and the theatrical presence of Wavey Ice all contributed to a floor that felt like a map of Irish whiskey's current ambition. This was seanchas made liquid — the stories of a dozen distilleries told in five sips, set to a pedal-steel soundtrack. For those who wanted to go deeper into the world of any particular brand after the evening, the Belfast Whiskey Map offered a useful compass for continuing the journey beyond the festival itself.

At £35 a ticket the value was straightforward: five cocktails, live music, and the kind of food offering — Pie Eyed, Badmaash, Top Dog, Sicariois among them — that would have justified the price on its own. The complimentary keepsake glass was a small but considered touch, the sort of thing that sits on a shelf and prompts the memory of the evening long after the slainte has faded. Common Market is the right venue for this kind of controlled chaos — contemporary enough to hold the energy, grounded enough not to feel precious about it. It gave the Cocktail Takeover room to breathe.

Limavady's presence at BWW 2025 extended well beyond this single evening — from cocktail-making sessions to the Belfast Whiskey Expo and a Tribal Burger collaboration that gave the brand a genuinely local flavour. But the Nashville night was perhaps the most vivid showcase of what makes the whiskey work in a crowd: it's approachable, it's distinctive, and it gives a good mixologist something to work with. If you want to explore the full Limavady range, you can browse their collection here, or revisit the full event details on the Cocktail Takeover event page. Some evenings leave a mark on a festival's reputation — this was one of them.